He became a professor and researcher at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas training younger artists such as Rodolfo Nieto, Pedro Coronel, Carlos Olachea and Juan Soriano.
[1] He spent his first four years of life in a community called Soberrón near Llanes, Asturias with his mother, Everanda Picazo de Cuevas, dying in Spain.
[1] His teachers in San Fernando included José Moreno Carbonero, Joaquín Sorolla and Julio Romero de Torres and studied with Salvador Dalí and Remedios Varo.
[2][4] He lived for the next fourteen years in Paris, at first studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and learning about new movements in art.
[1][2] He struggled economically, but also met a number of famous artists, studying the work of Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque and Matisse along with those of Italian Futurists and German Expressionists.
He collaborated with Henri Barbusse on the weekly Monde, illustrating texts by writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Maxim Gorki, Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair.
However, his anti-fascist activism along with collaboration with Federico García Lorca, Unamuno and León Felipe got him into trouble with the Spanish government.
[2] During the 1930s, he was a member of leftist artists' organization Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios and produced many illustrations for Luz, the magazine of the national electricians' union.
[5] However, Mexico from the 1930s to 1950s was highly nationalistic with the painters from the Mexican muralism movement dominating, making Balmori’s more international style less appealing.
[2] His drawings include those of dancers such as Raquel Gutierrez, Rosa Reina and his wife Helena, as well as sketches of the Ballet Antigona which was headed by José Limón.
[1] While studying in Madrid, observing copies of Greek, Roman and Egyptian statues, he declared that beyond all forms there is a universe of light and shadow, whose mysteries, he stated, were for painters to discover.